Army’s medical logisticians using technology to boost readiness
Army’s medical logisticians using technology to boost readiness
Publish Date: 2026-06-16 13:13:00
Source Domain: federalnewsnetwork.com
In the not-very-distant past, when a piece of medical equipment the Army relies on to care for soldiers in austere environments failed, it meant a time challenge for the service’s medical logistics community: The equipment often needed to be transported to the Army’s highly experienced maintainers, taking it out of service for days at a time.
But the logistics community has started to embrace telemaintenance — something akin to telemedicine, except for medical equipment. That’s meant the most experienced medical logisticians can now lend their expertise from a distance, in ways that end up getting equipment fixed in hours instead of days.
“Any time a medical device or any equipment leaves a theater, it’s a loss of the capability,” Wes Ladlee, the chief of Army Medical Logistics Command’s maintenance support office, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “And the time it takes to ship parts to get to a theater so they can be installed and get the capability up and running is lost downtime to readiness, it’s a risk to patients. It’s all about getting the maintenance right there at the point of need. To be able to have this type of system is almost putting you there with the soldier. Being able to mentor them and train them and help them, and obviously fix the equipment as soon as possible, has really been a game changer so far.”
Sending experts ‘over-the-horizon’
The first wave of medical logistics improvements began in 2017, when AMLC started assembling expert “fly away” teams to help repair equipment at units that didn’t have their own biomedical equipment specialists, designated 68As in the Army.
More recently though, the command has started leveraging technology both to better support those teams and to solve some problems remotely.
Under the traditional flyaway team model, a team could arrive within 72 hours of a request — but travel time, the repair…
